My poem, “The Birth of Longing,” has just been published in Braided Way, a wonderful online journal. You can link to the poem here. I wrote a very short essay on it years ago, which I offer below.

Illumination of “The Birth of Longing”

When I was seventeen, I found myself in the John Muir Woods outside of San Francisco. I have tried, for many years, to write about what I encountered there. It will never find adequate expression in words, but this poem is the closest that I have come. Yet I wrote it more than twenty years afterwards, when time had worked its distorting force on the memory, and an accretion of spiritual and religious meaning had grown around it. This is the problem with youthful mystical experience — the systems of meaning that we use to make sense of such experiences haven’t been encountered or absorbed yet, or at least they hadn’t been for me. I was left with an experience of the divine that existed in a vacuum, and once I started filling that vacuum with theology and Christian practice the experience itself seemed to change. It had to rattle against everything I was learning. At first it was a word shouted into the void. Now there was a landscape of thought in that void, and the word echoed against that landscape, and became inseparable from that echo.

This poem is full of a sense of loss. The loss of the original freshness and inarticulate nature of the experience itself, and then the loss that comes from the limitations of experience, and the fact that, try as I might, I have never been able to experience the power of that day in the John Muir Woods within the context of my Christian faith. I don’t blame my faith for this. It has led me to other mystical experiences, different in kind and intensity from that day in the woods, but full of grace and power, nonetheless. And I no longer want to experience a repetition of that day, although that was something I wanted very badly for many years. As I age, the restlessness begins to fade, or becomes less of a constant, so that even this poem, the truest expression of an ineffable moment that I can manage, grows less truthful in its closing lines. And that is the problem with memory, and with poetry. It tames experience. Yet without it, the experience would be lost, a fading echo disappearing into the trees.